Tribune opinion: Raids from 10 years ago a good example of how not to handle things

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents secure the back of the Greeley Swift & Co. meatpacking in December 2006.

As elected officials across the country prepare to reveal how they plan to tackle immigration, we'd like to invite them to take a look at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in our community that took place at decade ago.

They're a wonderful example of what not to do.

On Dec. 12, 2006, the federal government seized 1,300 workers from six Swift plants, including our own meatpacking plant that is now, of course, under different ownership.

ICE agents took 261 workers, most of them hard-working members of our community, out with their wrists bound in zip-ties and eventually deported them back to Mexico. Many families were torn apart, and even 10 years later, the memories are painful.

The raids are especially painful to think about now because it doesn't seem like much good came out of them.

We still don't have any kind of significant immigration reform. If we did have better, clearer policies, it's possible the raids wouldn't have happened. It's possible there would be no need for them.

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Swift participated in the E-Verify program, a federal program that verifies worker identification. At the time, it was only good at detecting false documents. Swift was actually sued for digging deeper into worker identifications. Then ICE told Swift officials they weren't asking enough about worker identities.

This is exactly the kind of mess that reform could solve. Maybe.

As it turns out, 25 cases of identity theft developed from the arrests. Identity theft is a serious crime of inconvenience, cost and crumbled credit for the victims unfortunate enough to experience it. Rep. Ken Buck, who was Weld County's district attorney at the time, talked about the pain identity theft causes.

And yet, he also said he's ready to support immigration reform along with increased border security. The two, he said, don't have to be exclusive to one another.

"I think we have blamed immigrants for the entire immigration mess, and that's not fair," Buck said. "The truth is, the U.S. government has screwed this up horribly in the last 40 years."

We agree, and though we didn't gain much from the ICE raids, perhaps we can still learn from them a decade later. We don't know if immigration reform would solve every problem that led to the ICE raids. But it would be nice to see our government try.